The Doors

By D.J. Nettleton

http://www.musikrave.com/music/the-doors

“O, This is the end, beautiful friend
this is the end, my only friend, the end Of all, elaborate plans the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I’ll never look into your eyes..again

The Killer awoke before dawn.
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall.”

Those were the chilling, hypnotic lyrics from “The End” by Jim Morrison and the Doors that I heard for the first time as we sat around a campfire, stocked well with a keg of beer, a bag of goodies and a portable cassette player in the middle of a pine forest in Fairfield, CT…and we were all speechless. We listened intently to the distant and perfectly paced notes of reverb from Robbie Krieger’s Gibson guitar dancing in the shadows, with the simple shakes of tambourine hissing like a rattlesnake, a stark yet simple intro as the words unveil the story of a murderous Norman Bates; of a man who wants revenge on his father and bliss with mother.

I became fascinated with The Doors that night and the legend of one James Douglas Morrison. But first some of the back story.

Back then (mid 1970′s) there was no cable tv, internet or cell phones. But there was an explosion of great music in every genre..from the 16th century flutes sounds of Tull to the island groove of Marley, to superior storytellers like Dylan and Neil Young, to the progressive adventure of Pink Floyd and Yes.

This vast content on vinyl plus massive, affordable concert touring made music a plentiful source of entertainment and curiosity for the next mega-hit band. Everyone!..jocks, gearheads; glittergals and of course those who did nothing but party would rush to the record stores when Zeppelin, The Stones, Skynyrd and dozens of great new bands like The Blue Oyster Cult or Boston would release ground breaking debut albums.

One night a friend of a friend’s older brother got one of the first copies of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. This dude also had one of the best stereos in town- a
400 watt amp with JBL’s.You heard 20 seconds of the beat and riff of “Kashmir” and knew that Page &Plant & Bonzo once again topped themselves!
That was a great feeling; taking knowing right away that you heard a historic recording before it even made it onto the airwaves!

For about 10 bucks you could go to the New Haven Coliseum and see Bad Company and Foghat warm up for the Edgar Winter group..a month later they were headliners! I also witnessed bottles breaking on the drumkit of The Ramones; chased off by the drunken, rowdy, general admission crowd who came to see Johnny Winter play the blues and not some unknown punk band blaring out two minute songs that seemed to be just noise! (Of course I hated them too until I knew better in later years.) Or the night a totally convincing Ray Davies at the Palace Theatre in Waterbury (capacity 2,500) swayed by the stage like a drunk during The Kinks “Demon Alchohol”. Or the mania of the Frampton Comes Alive tour­. My buddy Bob and I made the hour trip to Colt Park in Hartford in the back of a pickup truck sitting on lawn chairs with a cooler full of tall boys when Frampton raced onto the stage, tripped and a broke a rib but kept playing to the huge crowd of hippies and teeny-boppers.

But there was something mysterious and fascinating about the Doors music that turned them into my favorite band (at the time as a sophomore in high
school) even though Morrison had been dead for half a decade perhaps it was the smooth, baritone voice or the way he worked the arena crowds and ad-libbed with the audience on “Absolutely Live”. Or maybe it was the fact that Morrison was totally unpredictable and no one including the members of the band knew what he was going to say or do next.

I heard “Light My Fire” and “Love Me Two Times” thousands of times along with their other collection of FM hits – but when you went deeper into their library you could cue up much more complex and thematic material, ­poetic visions of war (The Unknown Soldier), Conquistadors (Spanish Caravan, The Crystal Ship, Land Ho!), gorgeous love songs (Indian Summer), mayhem (Peace Frog), hard driving, original blues (Road House Blues): “I woke up this morning and I got my self a beer! The end is always near.”

Morrison told Rolling Stone Magazine’s Ben Fong-Torres how his career got started after dropping out of UCLA Film School: ” I never did any singing. I never even conceived it. I thought I was going to be a writer or sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts,­ one or two at the most.

But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience..I was living down in the beach in abject poverty..it was a beautiful hot summer, and I just started hearing songs. I think I still have the notebook with those songs written in it.”

In a simple twist of fate, (yes that’s a Dylan song!) Ray Manzarek, a keyboardist and friend from his UCLA days stumbled upon a much thinner Jim hanging out at Venice Beach. Jim told Ray he lost a lot of weight from taking acid and not eating and mentioned his songs on paper. After convincing Morrison to show him his lyrics, Manzarek was blown away after reading the lyrics and hearing Jim sing “Moonlight Drive”.

“Let’s swim to the moon/let’s climb through the tide Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide Let’s swim out tonight love/it’s our turn to try Parked besides the ocean on our Moonlight Drive”

And that is how the Doors were born, Manzarek telling Rolling Stone.
“He had great lyrics and was a poet..”Moonlight Drive” was Jimmy Smith, Ray Charles, funky organ, just being cool and bluesy and he had death in his lyrics!” At the end of “Moonlight Drive” he says, “Come on baby, gonna take a little ride, go down by the Oceanside, get real close, get real tight, baby gonna drown tonight”. Morrison was the first rock n’ roller that I ever heard who brought death into the equation of youth; and I thought it was just brilliant. When Morrison came along and I heard those lyrics,” I said, ‘This is it.’ To get a rock and roll band together with a guy who was so amusing and so much fun and so knowledgeable and was writing original
lyrics- I said ‘Yeah, let’s do it Jim’, were gonna go all the way with this one!

Of note, Robbie Krieger wrote their biggest hit “Light My Fire”.

Here are my top 10 Doors Songs

1. The Soft Parade
2. Soul Kitchen
3. Moonlight Drive
4. The End
5. Light My Fire
6. Peace Frog
7. Indian Summer
8. LA Woman
9. When the Music¹s Over
10.Riders on the Storm

Also check out the live version of Little Red Rooster and Gloria covers

Bob Dylan — the epicenter of lyrical music

By Yancy Pelter

http://www.musikrave.com/music/bob-dylan-the-epicenter-of-lyrical-music

For me, Bob Dylan is the epicenter of lyrical music. Everything that came before him was a prelude to his genius. Everything that came after was possible because of him.
I am too young to have remembered his early days when he “rambled out of the Wild West” and roared into New York City on a snowy day in 1961. I came of age musical age about ten years later.

The experience that blew me away was the utter brilliance of Blood on the Tracks. I think I may have read Pete Hammil’s piece on the back jacket before I even played the album. Hamill’s tribute changed my life. I had to find out more about Dylan and this “oracle of Camus.”

So I did. It was 1974, and I somehow scrounged up enough coin to buy all his back albums. The highlight of this pivotal purchase was the frenzied trilogy of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. I played them over and over that summer, much to the dismay of my sister who was in her Jesus Christ Superstar phase and my father, who thought Dylan was a communist with a sore throat.

There was a particular song on Blonde on Blonde that hypnotized me with its expressive brilliance and enthralling beat. Performed with a slow, methodical tempo by a host of venerable Nashville session musicians, Visions of Johanna contains the most astonishing lyrics I’ve ever heard to this day. In fact, Great Britain’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, pronounced that it contained “the greatest song lyrics ever written.”

To hear someone sing: “ The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place,” was not only new to me, it was as if these words were not possible before Dylan—in the same way that Willie Mays’ famous catch in cavernous centerfield of the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series was not possible before he came along.

The best way to read the song is to take it all in at once, as if you are studying a painting in a gallery. Dylan is master manipulator of time, so expecting the song to follow a liner progression is futile. Instead, the time sequence, not to mention the point-of-view of the narrator, changes line-by-line. By the end of the song, I feel just like the narrator when Dylan concludes:

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Yes, my conscience explodes and all that is left is the art itself – the visions of Johanna.

It’s 30 years later I still am trying to find out more about Dylan. He is constantly changing and retooling – staying ahead of expectations. How does a 21-year-old write Blowing the Wind, or a 24-year-old write Like a Rolling Stone or even a 57-year-old write Highlands. No one has the answer to that, not even Dylan. I really believe he tapped into the vast creative pool of the collective unconscious, and we are the fortunate recipients of his effort.

My top ten Dylan songs:
1. Visions of Johanna
2. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
3. Like a Rolling Stone
4. It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall
5. Tangled up in Blue
6. Masters of War
7. Tombstone Blues
8. Hurricane
9. Ballad of a Thin Man
10. Ain’t Talkin’

Pink Floyd rocker Roger Waters still bears the emotional scars of his tough upbringing – he bursts into tears whenever he is under stress.

The bassist was raised by his mother after his father died on a World War II battlefield when Waters was just a baby.

He admits the lack of a father figure during his formative years left him confused about women, and now he’s opened up about his innermost emotions, confessing he often breaks down and weeps over the slightest confrontation.

Waters tells The Sunday Times Magazine, “Learning to understand women has been an incredibly difficult journey for me. I hate anger in women, I’ve never known how to deal with it. The way I have always dealt with it was by crying, and I think women hate that.

“I have cried an enormous amount in my life. Under any kind of emotional stress I would burst into tears – in fights with the band, in fights with women, I would just weep. I’m being honest. I am not what people think.”

Those with Roger Waters tickets to his upcoming tour could be lucky enough to see him reunite with former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour.

Waters will be touring the seminal Pink Floyd album The Wall, first released 30 years ago.

There have been recent rumours of Gilmour joining him on stage during one of the performances, with the last big gig the pair did together coming at Live 8 back in 2005.

However, in an interview with Sky News, Waters revealed that it is now likely Gilmour will indeed perform, but only at one gig.

“” hear the rumours – I think it’s beginning to look now as if he’ll do one gig, he’ll do Comfortably Numb at one gig,” he said.

“It’s a big secret when. Live 8 was the big one when Rick (Wright) was still alive – it was very moving.”

Roger Waters begins a UK tour with a six-date stint at the O2 in London starting on May 11th, with concerts in Manchester and Birmingham also scheduled.

Steven Van Zandt, an actor and musician known for his turns on “The Sopranos” and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is launching a music-themed social-networking site that he said will serve as a hub for insider information and advice directly from bands.

The site, Fuzztopia (currently in beta), is expected to launch in three to six months, Mr. Van Zandt said, and he is looking for funding in the low eight figures to get “from the present tense to the future.”

Mr. Van Zandt played the hyper-coiffed mobster Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos” and is a guitarist for the E Street Band. He and his team at Renegade Nation, the umbrella company for his music production and radio ventures, have sought to put all their business efforts online. He said he created Fuzztopia because he felt that there was no music site where experts and newbies could trade stories.

“It’s going to be like an insiders’ sort of Web site fans are welcome to peek in backstage,” he said. “It will be very revealing about what those musicians are thinking, where they get guitar strings at 2 a.m. in Cleveland, what’s their favorite diner in Oslo.”

Artists will be able to stream and sell their music on profiles and connect with their fans, as they can do on other sites such as MySpace and Last.fm. Fuzztopia will also host information on music classes and offer up tips from teachers, possibly a nod to Mr. Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to curb dropout rates by adding music curriculum to schools. Fuzztopia will be free initially but will eventually move to a subscription-based model, though those details are still in the works, he said.

Mr. Van Zandt, also known as “Little Steven,” has been busy building a career as a DJ and radio host to several Sirius satellite shows, including Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a syndicated weekly show celebrating garage rock. He also owns his own label, Wicked Cool Records, which has signed acts like the Charms, the Chesterfield Kings and the Cocktail Slippers.

He has also been critical of the quality of contemporary music and a rock evangelist of sorts, saying that young musicians need to rehearse more and play live shows, rather than learning an instrument in their bedrooms and putting their music on the Internet two weeks later.

“The truth of the matter is that greatness takes time,” Mr. Van Zandt said. “We have to learn to take that time again. Why not give the craft the credit it deserves and see how you can develop your potential, and be a little less promiscuous with your talent and actually spend a minute and learn something? Let’s learn how to write songs again!”

But Fuzztopia won’t be a promotional tool for his interests, he said. “We see the future as more of a cooperation than a competition,” he said. “We already have that philosophy with the radio show. Garage plays everybody; we don’t just play our own records. That’s our position in life, to support the music community, you know? That’s what the rock and roll world is all about.”

LONDON — The Beatles are back, sounding better than ever, and Britain is embracing them one more time.

It’s not exactly 1964 — no fainting teens or visible signs of feverish Beatlemania — but the long-awaited release of the remastered Beatles CDs and the Rock Band video game has again brought the Fab Four to the top of the British charts.

Or, as John Lennon liked to say, “to the toppermost of the poppermost.”

It was B-Day in much of the world Wednesday as the new versions of the old classics finally became available in Britain, the United States and elsewhere and many fans celebrated by flocking to Abbey Road, the studio where the Beatles recorded many of their hits.

Uma Nolan, an Irish nurse visiting London, came to the landmark recording studio to be photographed at the pedestrian crossing near the building made famous on the “Abbey Road” album cover. She plans to buy the entire set of 17 remastered CDs — even though she already has all the songs in collection.

“I will absolutely go out and buy them,” she said. “I’m a huge Beatles fan and have every single LP in original first edition copies. They were the first real pop group. The entire generation was waiting for that to happen. They sent worldwide pop culture off into orbit.”

Nolan, 50, said remastering the Beatles albums will introduce their masterworks to a new generation.

“It brings them up do date and modernizes their music,” she said. “You’re enhancing what was really to begin with, so that can’t be a bad thing.”

High prices are apparently no deterrent — online retailer Amazon.co.uk reported Wednesday that pre-orders for the Beatles box set, priced at 170 pounds ($280), put the Fab Four on top in terms of CD sales.

The robust sales are expected to add to the already considerable wealth of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the “thank my lucky stars” drummer who joined the band just before it had its first hit, as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of the late John Lennon and George Harrison. Court records publicized last year put McCartney’s net worth at about $800 million.

The critically praised Rock Band video game also is expected to sell well, even though McCartney told the New Musical Express magazine in a rare interview that he hasn’t road-tested the offering because he’s not much of a videogamer.

He said he was aware some purists would be offended by the licensed use of the Beatles music in a video game but felt it offered the long-defunct band a chance to reach a new, younger audience four decades after it split.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that it will introduce the Beatles music to people who might never have heard it because they game all the time, they don’t listen to the radio, and they haven’t got much of a record collection,” said McCartney.

The New Musical Express, which targets younger music fans, is using the releases as a chance for a major critical review of the band with the goal of getting a new generation to listen to the Beatles with fresh ears, said reviews editor Hamish MacBain.

“If we can get a bunch of 14-year-olds in 2009 to really hear them, that’s a very good thing,” he said, admitting that it takes “a certain kind of nerd” to appreciate the sonic changes offered by the remastered editions.

MacBain said many fans will shy away from spending 170 pounds for a complete new collection of songs they already have, but said the Beatles have more devoted fans than any other musicians.

“It takes a certain class of fan to replace things time and time again,” he said. “But the Beatles have a lot more of these kind of fans than any other band in the world. And having heard all the remasters, I can say that if you do have 170 pounds in your pocket there are worse ways to spend it. It made me appreciate the band more.”

Not everyone agrees. Rory Mulcahy, a retiree visiting Abbey Road, said he was not convinced he needed remastered CDs.

“I appreciate the songs and I love the Beatles, but I’m happy enough with the CD collection I’ve got,” he said. “I think there is a bit of moneymaking in there.”

The Beatles aren’t the only golden oldies making a nostalgic return to the charts. A collection of Dame Vera Lynn’s greatest hits from World War II has risen near the top of the UK album charts, challenging the top spot held by the much more contemporary Arctic Monkeys.

“It occurs to me that when she was in her heyday during the war she meant much the same as the Beatles did in their day,” said author and historian Jan Morris.

Associated Press Writer Karolina Tagaris in London contributed to this report

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Les Paul, whose innovations with the electric guitar and studio technology made him one of the most important figures in recorded music, has died, according to a statement from his publicists. Paul was 94.

Paul died in White Plains, New York, from complications of severe pneumonia, according to the statement.

Paul was a guitar and electronics mastermind whose creations — such as multitrack recording, tape delay and the solid-body guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul — helped give rise to modern popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll. No slouch on the guitar himself, he continued playing at clubs into his 90s despite being hampered by arthritis.

“If you only have two fingers , you have to think, how will you play that chord?” he told CNN.com in a 2002 phone interview. “So you think of how to replace that chord with several notes, and it gives the illusion of sounding like a chord.”

“The world has lost a truly innovative and exceptional human being today. I cannot imagine life without Les Paul,” said Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar. “He would walk into a room and put a smile on anyone’s face. His musical charm was extraordinary and his techniques unmatched anywhere in the world.”

Lester William Polfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on June 9, 1915. Even as a child he showed an aptitude for tinkering, taking apart electric appliances to see what made them tick.

“I had to build it, make it and perfect it,” Paul said in 2002. He was nicknamed the “Wizard of Waukesha.”

In the 1930s and ’40s, he played with the bandleader Fred Waring and several big band singers, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, as well as with his own Les Paul Trio. In the early 1950s, he had a handful of huge hits with his then-wife, Mary Ford, such as “How High the Moon” and “Vaya Con Dios.”

His guitar style, heavily influenced by jazzman Django Reinhardt, featured lightning-quick runs and double-time rhythms. In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.

Paul also credited Crosby for teaching him about timing, phrasing and preparation.

Crosby “didn’t say it, he did it — one time only. Unless he blew the lyrics, he did one take.”

Paul never stopped tinkering with electronics, and after Crosby gave him an early audiotape recorder, Paul went to work changing it. It eventually led to multitrack recording; on Paul and Ford’s hits, he plays many of the guitar parts, and Ford harmonizes with herself. Multitrack recording is now the industry standard.

But Paul likely will be best remembered for the Gibson Les Paul, a variation on the solid-body guitar he built in the early 1940s — “The Log” — and offered to the guitar company.

“For 10 years, I was a laugh,” he told CNN in an interview. “ kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.”

Gibson, spurred by rival Fender, finally took Paul up on his offer and introduced the model in 1952. It has since become the go-to guitar for such performers as Jimmy Page.

Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is survived by three sons, a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Until recently he had a standing gig at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club, where he would play with a who’s-who of famed musicians.

He admired the places guitarists and engineers took his inventions, but he said there was nothing to replace good, old-fashioned elbow grease and soul.

“I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one,” he said in 2002, “and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes.”

Madonna’s concert in Copenhagen on Tuesday finished in tumultuous scenes as Swedish fans tried to return home by train.

A train scheduled to depart from Copenhagen central station at around 1am on Wednesday suffered delays as Swedish fans of the “Material Girl” tried to squeeze into the already packed train carriages.

“People were vomiting and fights broke out. It was verging on panic,” according to Marie Wernhult for news agency TT from the Danish capital.

“The train has left, 20 minutes late, and still there are hundreds of travellers stuck on the platform. And just as many have probably already given up and taken a taxi to Malmö.”

The Danish rail operator DSB has been criticised for not laying on any extra trains despite massive Swedish interest in the self-styled “Queen of Pop’s” Sticky & Sweet tour.

“No extra trains have been arranged and no extra carriages have been added. The trains go as normal with one four-carriage train every hour. DSB has not taken into consideration that was a concert on,” Marie Wernhult said.

DSB has responded however that they had in fact provided extra carriages on five of their trains on Tuesday evening in response to extra demand due to the concert.

“We used all the capacity we had available. We have to keep the other trains running as well,” Irene Lippold at DSB said.

TT/The Local (news@thelocal.se/08 656 6518)

For the week leading up to the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, VH1 has assembled a valuable series of documentaries that revisit significant people and movements from the 1960s – even if they overstate some of those people’s importance.

The week starts tonight with Andy Warhol, then moves through Timothy Leary, the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ali and Cheech and Chong before getting to Woodstock itself.

Old-timers who were there can expect a lot of flashbacks, and those who weren’t might find it educational, a word not always used in connection with Cheech and Chong.

The strongest parts of this week’s series, collectively called “Lords of the Revolution,” are the Black Panthers and Ali, both of whom struck much of white America as dangerously radical in the ’60s.

Today, ironically, the greater danger with Ali is oversentimentalizing him.

He was always a hustler and promoter in addition to being a remarkable athlete. But he did and said some things in the ’60s that did not advance his personal interests, and today he’s rightly respected for that.

As time passes, his complexity also becomes increasingly apparent – as it has for some years with the Black Panthers.

The government feared the Panthers so much it tried to systematically destroy them – and to some extent, the group welcomed that kind of fearful response as a sign of attention and respect.

But the Panthers weren’t just about getting in white America’s face. Their core program was community empowerment and self-sufficiency, a goal toward which many communities today are still struggling.

The Panthers and Ali nights explore more complex questions, in any case, than the Warhol and Leary programs.

Some of tonight’s speakers declare that Warhol shaped all of modern culture, from movies to television to celebrity.

The people who say it, however, all come from within the Warhol circle. It would sound more compelling if someone outside the circle were connecting those same arguable dots.

Warhol’s Factory did turn out, or at least encourage, a number of creative talents, from designer Betsey Johnson to musician Lou Reed and actress Sally Kirkland.

Footage shot back in the day, and there’s a considerable amount of it, now looks like something that could be shown at a high school reunion while people turn to each other and say, “Man, can you believe how wild and crazy we were in those days?”

The sense of zany fun is dampened somewhat, however, by the number of Warhol people who died young and the microscopically thin line between “fabulously creative” and “deeply troubled.” Too often it’s all just sad.

Tonight’s Warhol show does raise one broader proposition: that popular culture is advanced by a small elite of misunderstood visionaries.

Maybe. Sometimes. Credit VH1 this week for putting it on the table.

BABY boomers won’t let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we? It’s one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending.

On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), N.Y. We listened to some of the best rock musicians of the era, enjoyed other legal and illegal pleasures, endured rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant communityand dispersed, all without catastrophe.

A year after the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, expectations about large gatherings of young people were so low that this was considered a surprise. Although the festival didn’t go exactly as planned, it was, as advertised, three days of peace and music. That made Woodstock an idyll, particularly in retrospect, even though it was declared a state disaster area at the time.

“Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work,” Lou Yank, the chief of police in nearby Monticello, told The New York Times.

Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other, more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and relief, the festival’s full legacy had as much to do with excess as with idealism. As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace. It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center crowd — nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged L.S.D.-popping hippies — was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong. There’s a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s farm (though the original Woodstock hillside has been left undeveloped).

A new, much expanded anthology of music recorded at the 1969 festival has been issued: the six-CD “Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm” (Rhino). Complete Woodstock performances by Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Janis Joplin and others have been released by Sony Legacy. Cable and public television channels have their Woodstock specials scheduled, and there’s yet another batch of commemorative books, including “The Road to Woodstock” (Ecco) by the festival’s instigator, Michael Lang, which includes tidbits like how much the bands were paid. “Taking Woodstock,” a comedy directed by Ang Lee, is due for release this month.

A summer package tour, Heroes of Woodstock, features musicians who appeared at Woodstock — including Jefferson Starship (playing Jefferson Airplane songs), Levon Helm from the Band, Tom Constanten from the Grateful Dead, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Country Joe McDonald. It arrives at Bethel Woods precisely on Aug. 15.

Unlike previous anniversaries in 1994 and 1999, however, there’s no big festival this year bearing the Woodstock name — reflecting, perhaps, the dismal memories of Woodstock ’99 in Rome, N.Y., where a hot, pent-up audience, angry at high vendor prices, set fires and looted and vandalized the site.

While the original Woodstock showed how much discomfort an audience would put up with for the sake of sharing an event — something promoters were happy to learn — Woodstock ’99 breached the limit of fan exploitation.

Yet the original Woodstock still has a rosy glow. It was finite and all smiles — far different from the Vietnam War, the racial tensions and the much-discussed generation gap of the same era. Woodstock became free in both senses of the word: free as in liberated (from drug laws and dress codes) and free as in gratis, not collecting tickets and handing out,as Wavy Gravy said, “breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

A cynic might see the festival as a prime example of how coddled the baby boomers were in an economy of abundance. The Woodstock crowd, which arrived with more drugs than camping supplies, got itself a free concert, and when the people responsible could no longer handle the logistics, the government bailed them out. Some people took it upon themselves to help others; many just freeloaded.

Still, Woodstock gave virtually everyone involved — ticketholders, gate crashers, musicians, doctors, the police — a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one another, which was only sensible. Musicians performed for the biggest audience of their lives. Townspeople and the National Guard pitched in to keep people fed and healthy. No one, The New York Times reported, called the cops “pigs.”

One lunatic with a gun could have changed everything. The Altamont Festival, marred all day by violence, took place only four months later. Miraculously, at Woodstock, there was none.

Seemingly within minutes after it ended Woodstock was the stuff of legend: a spirit, a nation, an ideal, amorphous but vivid, with an Oscar-winning documentary film, the 1970 “Woodstock,” to prove it wasn’t all a hallucination. (The film was also an early lesson in how profitable ancillary rights could be; the festival itself lost money, but the film recouped it many times over.)

Sheer size made Woodstock consequential. It was huge. The Beatles had played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium; the 1965 Newport Folk Festival spread about 71,000 people over four days. Had Woodstock drawn the 100,000 to 150,000 people that its promoters planned for, it would simply have been one in a string of big rock festivals dating back to Monterey Pop in 1967, which had an estimated total of 200,000 people over three days.

After Woodstock gave up on collecting tickets — abandoning flimsy fences and declaring itself a free festival — it grew to what was variously estimated as 300,000 or 400,000 people, more than double the attendance of previous rock festivals. That number would have been considerably higher if traffic problems hadn’t turned some away; many people walked for miles to the site.

When the hippie subculture surfaced en masse at Woodstock, two years after the Summer of Love, it was still largely self-invented and isolated. There were pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls of them in smaller towns, nearly all feeling like outsiders. For many people at the festival, just seeing and joining that gigantic crowd was more of a revelation than anything that happened onstage. It proved that they were not some negligible minority but members of a larger culture — or, to use that sweetly dated term, a counterculture.

At Woodstock hippiedom simultaneously reached its public peak and opened itself to imitation and trivialization — one more glimmer of rebellion to be deflated into a style statement.

For true believers Woodstock was about cooperation and mutual aid, and about making love, not war. (At a time when Vietnam had divided America into hawks and doves, that was a peace dove sitting on the guitar in the festival logo.) But Woodstock was also a whole lot of people getting stoned at a rock concert, which was much easier than working to change the world.

Politicos like Abbie Hoffman, who is widely credited with coining the phrase Woodstock Nation, wanted to claim Woodstock as a symbol of resistance to repression. But Pete Townshend batted Hoffman off the stage with a guitar when Hoffman interrupted the Who’s set to protest the imprisonment, for drug possession, of a fellow activist, John Sinclair.

There was antiwar fervor in some songs, like Richie Havens’s “Handsome Johnny” and McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Joan Baez spoke about her husband, in jail for draft dodging, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” There was also, in much of the music, that particular late-1960s aura of imminent doom or enlightenment, in songs like “Wooden Ships” (performed by both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) and the Who’s “Amazing Journey.” And there was Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with its screams of feedback and its divebombing glissandos, brash and dire, angry and insistently American. But Woodstock was no earnest rally; it had love songs, blues and extended guitar jams.

After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock Market: a demographic target group about to have its dreams stripped of radical purpose and turned into commodities. A wider audience realized it was possible to enjoy the music, drugs and fun without the ideological trappings. Soon enough everyone was a quasi-hippie; long hair on men no longer signaled anything about what they stood for. FM radio, which was the pipeline for underground rock, traded quirky, exploratory disc jockeys for consistent formats that advertisers could depend on. Now that it was clear how large an audience was at stake — that it wasn’t just a few freaks — professionals were back in charge.

Woodstock and other late-1960s festivals changed the scale of rock concerts. Bands eagerly moved up to arenas from theaters; a week before Woodstock, for example, two of its acts, the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker, shared a bill at the Fillmore East, which had all of 2,700 seats. Music soon expanded, or bloated, to fill its newfound arenas. The early 1970s were the era of noodling jams and 10-minute drum solos that would have to be torpedoed, a few years later, by punk-rock.

Larger gatherings followed Woodstock. An estimated 600,000 people showed up at both the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 and at the one-day Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973. But those were merely concerts, not cultural symbols. Appropriately or not, Woodstock is still invoked when describing latter-day festivals, although they are considerably smaller, better organized and more comfortable than Woodstock was. None of them tolerate gate crashers.

Since Woodstock I’ve been to more rock festivals than I can easily remember. Most, sooner or later, involve mud. Some have simply been like extremely long standing-room concerts; some have the comforting familiarity of ritual, like the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which dates back almost as far as Woodstock; it had its 40th edition this year).

A few, like Coachella and Bonnaroo, run in stretches like a smart disc-jockey set, segueing neatly through various bands. And a handful have felt like generational statements: the first Lollapalooza (in 1991) and Lilith Fair (in 1997) and, surprisingly, Woodstock ’94 (in Saugerties, N.Y.), which juxtaposed performers from the original Woodstock Festival with more contemporary bands, creating what was probably the only mosh pit ever to greet Crosby, Stills and Nash. But all of them have been consumer experiences: a planned entertainment package of scheduled music and convenient vendors.

Woodstock was different. It was, particularly for a sheltered teenager, an adventure: sloppy, chaotic, bewildering, drenched, uncertain, sometimes excruciating, sometimes ecstatic. Although I was drug free, I had the feeling that the crowd was more than just an audience at a show, that something major was at stake, that Woodstock would prove something to the world. What it proved — that for at least one weekend, hippies meant what they said about peace and love — was fleeting and all too innocent; it couldn’t stand up to everyday human nature or to the pragmatic workings of the market. But 40 years later the sensation lingers.